Making Distinctions

March 4, 2007by Atanu Dey

Hauled from the archives, here is a bit on the distinction between information and knowledge. This is important because I think we are in an age of superfluous information (followup to that here.) Making distinctions aids comprehension and consequently the ability to efficiently effect change. I like to distinguish between economic growth and development because economic development is the goal and in many cases economic growth is the instrument for development.

I agree with the distinction you make between data, information, knowledge, understanding, wisdom and enlightenment. The last three are slightly nebulously defined, but there’s an interesting a hierarchy among those six concepts. Data encodes information — you extract the latter by processing the former. A similar relation exists between information and knowledge — you convert information into something you store in your brain. And so forth for the other four.

So, technically, data in some sense contains the other five, assuming you have a computer (or brain) handy that can do all the required processing and storage.